"The Myth of Charter Schools" By Diane Ravitch

[YankeeLeft7x]

The Myth of Charter Schools

November 11, 2010
Diane Ravitch
NYREV

Ordinarily, documentaries about education attract little attention, and seldom, if ever, reach neighborhood movie theaters. Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for “Superman” is different. It arrived in late September with the biggest publicity splash I have ever seen for a documentary. Not only was it the subject of major stories in Time and New York, but it was featured twice on The Oprah Winfrey Show and was the centerpiece of several days of programming by NBC, including an interview with President Obama.

Two other films expounding the same arguments—The Lottery and The Cartel—were released in the late spring, but they received far less attention than Guggenheim’s film. His reputation as the director of the Academy Award–winning An Inconvenient Truth, about global warming, contributed to the anticipation surrounding Waiting for “Superman,” but the media frenzy suggested something more. Guggenheim presents the popularized version of an account of American public education that is promoted by some of the nation’s most powerful figures and institutions.

The message of these films has become alarmingly familiar: American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, but they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit.

The Cartel maintains that we must not only create more charter schools, but provide vouchers so that children can flee incompetent public schools and attend private schools. There, we are led to believe, teachers will be caring and highly skilled (unlike the lazy dullards in public schools); the schools will have high expectations and test scores will soar; and all children will succeed academically, regardless of their circumstances. The Lottery echoes the main story line of Waiting for “Superman”: it is about children who are desperate to avoid the New York City public schools and eager to win a spot in a shiny new charter school in Harlem.

Read the Entire Article @:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/?pagination=false&printpage=true

[yurbud]

1. my wife is a public elementary school teacher who paid $2,000 out of her own pocket

for books and supplies for her class this year, and about the same every other year she has taught, in part to make up for shitty materials required by test obsessed administrators.

Privatizing public ed will lead to more corruption and eventually a crash like the housing market one except it will be our children's futures that will be foreclosed, all to make the already wealthy wealthier still.

[Nite Owl]

2. K&R

[AdHocSolver]

3. Privatized schools are on a par with privatized health insurance.

The real failure in America is unregulated corporate capitalism.

Granted there are problems with education in the U.S. However, the problems are endemic to just about all education in the U.S. whether public or private.

The privatized schools just continue the failed practices that have short-changed American children, while costing Americans more money with the corporations extracting profit from their failure.

The only way to improve education is to redesign it from the ground up the way that places like Finland did.

We need to redesign the curricula, the school day, the textbooks, teacher training, and student evaluation as well as reducing the influence of corporations and fringe religious and social groups.

Blaming teachers is a distraction from the real problems with American education that have not just come about, but have dogged this country for the last fifty or sixty years. These problems were swept under the rug so long as the economy chugged along and people could make a living. Now that the economy is in the toilet thanks to corporate outsourcing jobs to low wage countries such as China, the corporations have to convince the public that it is not the corporations' fault, but the fault of U.S. education, especially the teachers and their unions.

This parallels the corporations blaming the workers and their unions for the corporations having to outsource to make enough profit to stay in business. Notice a parallel argument?

The corporate "solution" gets them two prizes at once. They "steal" the public funds that were going to public education, and they ensure no students get a real education, so that they can blame "uneducated" Americans for the corporations having to hire foreigners to put together a capable work force.

An article about Finland's successes in redesigning their schools can be found at: http://www.nea.org/home/40991.htm